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Gordon, Miriam

Gordon, Miriam

PhD Student @ University of Warwick

Bio

Miriam Gordon is a second year PhD student at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the intersection between place, displacement and gender in French Caribbean Literature. She has given papers at several conferences including for the Society of Francophone Postcolonial Studies and CARACOL. Miriam has also published a book review of Laëtitia Saint-Loubert’s The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation with the journal Modern and Contemporary France. She also sits on the Society for Caribbean Studies committee as a postgraduate representative with an active role organising their annual conferences.

Geographical location : Warwick, UK

Research Area and Interest : intersections between place, displacement and gender in French Caribbean Literature

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Panel(s)

Reading Franco-Creole Writing
Summary:

Presentation(s)

(Re)memories and Place: Toni Morrison and French Caribbean Women's Literature.
Summary: Within French Caribbean Literature, the fragmented history of the region is often transposed into reimagined stories to compensate for the lack of history and the suppressed memories of slavery. Prominent female writers such as Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor have the additional task of centring female voices into (hi)stories that have marginalised them. It is no accident then, that these authors (or the scholars surrounding them) make reference to and inspired by the work of African-American author Toni Morrison, whose own novels deal similarly with the slave past of the United States and its continued aftermath. Taking the concept of ‘rememory’, a term first coined in Morrison’s seminal work Beloved (1987), this paper seeks to define ‘rememory’ as the continual process of remembering and forgetting being bound together by the imagination. Rememory also has a certain physicality where places are not just remembered in the mind but also remain ‘out there in the world’ (Beloved, 1988, p.36). In this way, the paper will comment on the multifaceted nature of rememory as shown in Morrison’s novel and French Caribbean writers Fabienne Kanor and Gisèle Pineau’s works- Humus (2004) and Femmes des Antilles (1998) respectively. The paper also analyses the spatial aspect of rememory, using the symbols of the river and sea to highlight the importance of these places in ‘rememoring’ the troubled histories both in the US and in the Caribbean.

Links of Interest